My new browser start page

30boxes Webtop meta-replaced NetVibes as my new browser start page. Quite beautiful & effective interface! The web as platform is reality!

You add to it your web-based applications, such as:

• Google spreadsheets
• Box.net storage
• Your 30boxes/Google calendar
• TimeTracker
• Your webmail client (not supported, don’t know why)
• Pandora music player
• Your favorite content sites
• NetVibes content/services aggregator
• &c

I’m still missing there my other crucial apps, such as:

• Mind mapping, such as FreeMind (which I use instead of writing documents)
• Web-based development environment (e.g., for Java/Python/JavaScript)

A screenshot:

BTW, has anyone tried MIT’s YouOS?

 

Employees work visibility

In 1999 I was building a platform that allowed Web access to regular applications & IT resources (using Grid & other innovative concepts). It brought up an interesting issue, that may be regarded as a feature or as a concern: an employee’s managers could easily see everything the employee did (thru his computer), as if they had a spyware recording his mouse & keyboard actions, but on a higher level.

Today, as all applications are being transformed to the Web, this feature/concern starts being a reality. For example, when working these days on some training program using the great open-source application Moodle, I noticed that all managers can see everything I do, & have complete visibility on all users actions (this big brother interfaces exist there because they allow monitoring the activities & participation of students).

This is just another example of the implications of transparency, but it’s quite interesting & life-changing: say welcome to your boss new permanent virtual position over your shoulder!

 

Summary notes from Joshua Schachter talk

[My notes from the recorded talk of del.icio.us author at the Carson Workshop Summit on the future of Web Apps:]

• Scaling
  • Recommends reading: Cal Handerson & Brad Fitzpatrick (Flickr & LiveJournal) presentation on how to make things fast (scaling) – helped Joshua a lot
  • Nagios - to figure what went wrong, get alerts
  • Use caching everywhere possible
  • figure where you can be latent (slopy), & be latent there
  • wait to see what actually breaks before it actually does
  • Know how to tune DB & Apache
  • Put Proxy – not Apache – before it: prioritizing services, load balancing
  • e.g., someone saves the site to his disk – this will blow the site
  • e.g., Greasemonkey script that checks delicious on every web page
  • throttlling
• API – help adoption
  • the easier API is, the more they’re used
  • don’t expose the internal identifier, especially if its sequential or computable (people will iterate on it)
• what features to add?
  • things that are crucial for success (eg tagging) – very usable, must be added
  • don’t add something that exist elsewhere (e.g. messages)
  • if something is asked, try understand the reason, what’s the real problem that needs to be solved
  • some features have a too heavy performance price (eg query calculus)
• put RSS every possible thing
  • always be able to answer: is there new data in this RSS (by time)? this will save access to data
  • RSS is the heaviest traffic
• hide everything of the underlying framework (e.g., filename.php)
• watch for new behavior in the application, & decide what to do with it
• solve a problem you really have (Joshua had a text file with 26K bookmarks) – because you really understand the problem & passionate on solving it better than whoever don’t have it
• every day your system isn’t open, you’re loosing users & input. get it out there asap
• aggregation of attention (what’s popular today) is cool when the population is small, if its big there’s too much bias. create piles of attention
• spam – people will try to get to the pile of attention
  • when you track spammers, don’t give them any feedback (error messages &c)
• tagging:
  • useful for recall
  • ok for discovery
  • bad for distribution
  • not all metadata is tags
  • make people make the minimal amount of work
• understand the motivation of the people
  • user 1 have to find the system useful (from selfish reasons)
  • if the value is from many users, it’s problematic
  • the tip: the users community should want to get more users to the system (evangalize, viral)
• beaware where you spend your efforts (e.g., a feature no one ever uses)
• watch your system carefully
  • intuition backed by data
  • measure everything
  • how people react to features, what they do
  • measure behavior rather than claims
• testing is very important
  • user acceptance testing
  • everybody on the team should look behind the mirror on actual user labs
  • when doing labs, don’t give them todo’s
  • they worked with “Creative Good“
• use the users language
  • don’t make them use your language
• registration for seeing is a roadblock
  • give as much functionality possible without registration
  • users want to get a good idea of what they’ll get before registering
  • you must show them, they won’t read about it
  • registration should be as fast as possible, & get you to where you were before
• understand where you’re breaking the current paradigm, but other than that, learn & use how the world/internet work (emulate it)
• you have to develop a set of morals
  • its the users data, not your data
  • CRUD their data
  • up to remove all your account data
• infection vectors
  • Joshua spend $0
  • promote evangalism
  • RSS is good – you evade channels, get to applications & users
• understand how a community uses your system
  • Joshua don’t want to own the community – the community is elsewhere
  • just enable communities use your system, don’t force them anything

[See also:

• a collaborative summary of this talk I found on the Web
• Mindmap summary of this talk from Larsz
• a lecture I gave on Web2.0 & the Semantic Web]

 

Del.icio.us summary

My links library currently have 1104 bookmarks (though I’ve got many more waiting to be added).

My top bookmark sources (courtasy of Pascal van Hecke’s service):

del.icio.us	14
ocw.mit.edu	13
wired.com	13
manageability.org	9
newscientist.com	9
www-106.ibm.com	9
nytimes.com	8
google.com	7
alphaworks.ibm.com	6
flickr.com	6
msnbc.msn.com	5
kurzweilai.net	5
news.bbc.co.uk	5
ynet.co.il	5
today.java.net	5
java.sun.com	5
itconversations.com	4
jroller.com	4
news.com.com	4
businessweek.com	4
betaversion.org	4
slashdot.org	4
arxiv.org	4
theserverside.com	4
paulgraham.com	4
protege.stanford.edu	4
joelonsoftware.com	4
sourceforge.net	4
blog.changethis.com	3
acmqueue.com	3
tbray.org	3
news.yahoo.com	3
peteryared.blogspot.com	3
www-128.ibm.com	3
onjava.com	3
trnmag.com	3
computerworld.com	3
web.media.mit.edu	3
aaai.org	3
softwarememetics.com	3
edge.org	3
javaworld.com	3
adaptivepath.com	3
theonion.com	3
labs.google.com	3
l3s.de	2
digg.com	2
writely.com	2
npr.org	2
radio.weblogs.com	2
eaiblueprint.com	2
socialtext.net	2
eecs.harvard.edu	2
cs.ucl.ac.uk	2
webservices.sys-con.com	2
cs.vu.nl	2
iridia.ulb.ac.be	2
sciam.com	2
santafe.edu	2
activegrid.com	2
beust.com	2
arstechnica.com	2
technologyreview.com	2
ontoware.org	2
hyperorg.com	2
guardian.co.uk	2
ethomaz.com	2
sys-con.com	2
myprogs.net	2
maps.google.com	2
keyhole.com	2
cse.buffalo.edu	2
last.fm	2
e-mago.co.il	2
weblog.infoworld.com	2
aec.at	2
simile.mit.edu	2
jaist.ac.jp	2
falundafa.org.il	2
onlamp.com	2
xml.com	2
ai.sri.com	2
openrico.org	2
accelerating.org	2
warhol.org	2
americanscientist.org	2
tibco.com	2
opennlp.sourceforge.net	2
sciencenews.org	2
cogsci.indiana.edu	2
books.slashdot.org	2
c2.com	2
lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk	2
primidi.com	2
ldodds.com	2
salon.com	2
neilernst.net	2
startupnation.com	2
code.google.com	2
reader2.com	2
w3.org	2
citeulike.org	2
crresearch.com	2
sethgodin.typepad.com	2
43things.com	2
schneider.blogspot.com	2
theregister.co.uk	2
livejournal.com	2
nature.com	2
pandora.com	2
hpl.hp.com	2
www-unix.globus.org	2
asimovlaws.com	2
workhappy.net	2
darpa.mil	2
generation5.org	2
itee.uq.edu.au	2
azulsystems.com	2
worldcommunitygrid.org	2